ATI Radeon HD 5500 Series GDDR5 Review
Total System Power Consumption
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.
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All three of the cards tested here consume relatively little power. None of them require a supplemental power connector and can be fed completely by the PEG slot they are plugged into. As you can see, the GeForce GT 240 consumed the least amount of power while idling while the Radeon HD 5550 used the least under load, but all three of the card were within a few watts of each other. And all of the cards run so cool and quiet as to be a non-issue.
